ML Research Engineer, ML Systems

About Scale Scale’s mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world’s most important decisions. As the leading AI data foundry, we provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world’s most advanced models — fueling breakthroughs in generative AI, defense, and autonomous vehicles. We partner with leading enterprises and governments to bring AI into production that performs when it matters most, combining rigorous evaluation with full-stack deployment so our customers can build AI they can trust. About the Team Applied Intelligence Systems (AIS) is part of the Scale Generative AI Platform (SGP), focused on pushing the frontier of what agentic applications can do across diverse enterprise and government use cases. We build the infrastructure and tooling that power agentic AI in production, paired with applied ML research, design, and evaluation to ensure these systems perform reliably at the scale our customers demand. AIS spans multiple workstreams — agent evaluation and oversight, orchestration and tool-use infrastructure, model and systems optimization, and applied research on new agent capabilities — and this role is not scoped to any single one of them. We’re growing fast, with increasing traction across both commercial and public sector customers, and we’re just getting started — this team will define what dependable, production-grade agentic AI looks like. About the Role As a Staff Machine Learning Research Engineer, you will operate across the full breadth of AIS’s technical needs — wherever the hardest ML problem in agentic AI happens to be that quarter. This could mean training and fine-tuning models, designing evaluation and observability systems, building improvement loops from production data, prototyping novel agent architectures, or designing internal systems and tooling that boost productivity across teams. You’re not tied to one team’s roadmap; you’re expected to move to where the technical leverage is highest, and t

About Scale AI Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with the world's leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI transformation through frontier AI systems that solve real business problems. Every day, we work with organizations across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, media and telecommunications to build production AI agents that automate complex workflows, help humans, reason over enterprise knowledge, and operate safely at scale. The Opportunity Applied AI is moving faster than ever. New foundation models, reasoning techniques, agent architectures, and research papers emerge every week. Yet building AI systems that reliably solve real-world problems remains one of the hardest engineering challenges. As a Frontier Agent Engineer (Applied AI) , you'll bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and production deployment. You'll work directly with enterprise customers to design, evaluate, and deploy intelligent systems that combine frontier models with structured knowledge, retrieval, traditional machine learning, and enterprise software. Unlike traditional ML roles that focus on a single model or product, you'll work across a diverse portfolio of AI challenges spanning multiple industries and use cases. You may build a multi-agent research system and then participate in designing a customer intelligence platform, a healthcare copilot, or an autonomous workflow for a Fortune 100 company. If you enjoy reading new AI papers, experimenting with the latest models, and shipping production systems that create measurable business impact, you'll fit right in. What You'll Build Frontier AI Systems Design and deploy production AI agents that leverage the latest advances in large language models, reasoning, retrieval, memory, and tool use. Architect intelligent systems that combine LLMs, traditional machine learning, structured knowledge, enterprise data

About Scale AI Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with the world's leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI transformation through frontier AI systems that solve real business problems. Every day, we work with organizations across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, media and telecommunications to build production AI agents that automate complex workflows, help humans, reason over enterprise knowledge, and operate safely at scale. The Opportunity Applied AI is moving faster than ever. New foundation models, reasoning techniques, agent architectures, and research papers emerge every week. Yet building AI systems that reliably solve real-world problems remains one of the hardest engineering challenges. As a Senior Frontier Agent Engineer (Applied AI) , you'll bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and production deployment. You'll work directly with enterprise customers to design, evaluate, and deploy intelligent systems that combine frontier models with structured knowledge, retrieval, traditional machine learning, and enterprise software. Unlike traditional ML roles that focus on a single model or product, you'll work across a diverse portfolio of AI challenges spanning multiple industries and use cases. You may build a multi-agent research system and then participate in designing a customer intelligence platform, a healthcare copilot, or an autonomous workflow for a Fortune 100 company. If you enjoy reading new AI papers, experimenting with the latest models, and shipping production systems that create measurable business impact, you'll fit right in. What You'll Build Frontier AI Systems Design and deploy production AI agents that leverage the latest advances in large language models, reasoning, retrieval, memory, and tool use. Architect intelligent systems that combine LLMs, traditional machine learning, structured knowledge, enterpri

About the Team The Merchant (Mx) AI/ML team is a cornerstone of DoorDash’s merchant organization. We empower our restaurant partners to thrive on DoorDash by building intelligent, scalable AI systems that simplify operations, elevate their digital presence, and enhance customer engagement. Our world-class machine learning engineers develop production-grade AI solutions that power the entire merchant lifecycle — from onboarding and store setup to menu management, growth, and real-time order operations. The team is deeply customer-obsessed and impact-driven, focused on turning cutting-edge research in LLMs, multimodal learning, generative AI, and agentic automation into products that make our merchants more successful every day. About the Role We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Mx AI/ML team, driving the design and deployment of next-generation AI product solutions that power our merchant experiences. This is a highly cross-functional leadership role — you’ll collaborate with product, design, operations, and data science teams to define the AI roadmap, guide technical direction, and deliver end-to-end AI/ML solutions at massive scale. You’ll lead a team of talented ML engineers who are building real AI products delivered to merchants’ fingertips, helping them become more successful on DoorDash. You’re excited about this opportunity because you will… Lead and grow a team of exceptional AI/ML engineers developing production-grade machine learning and generative AI solutions for the merchant ecosystem. Define a multi-year strategy and execute the AI roadmap across key Mx pillars — Onboarding, Menu Media Understanding & Generation, Menu Metadata Intelligence, and Agentic Task Automation. Partner with product and operations to translate merchant pain points into scalable AI-powered solutions. Own the end-to-end lifecycle of ML systems — from ideation and experimentation to productionization and continuous improvement. Drive innovation in multimodal AI

Director of Engineering, Physical AI Role Overview The Director of Engineering will report to the General Manager of Physical AI, and will be responsible for leading a multi-disciplinary engineering organization. In this senior leadership role, you will own the execution of the Physical AI Data Engine — the platform powering the next generation of Physical AI/Embodied AI. You will collaborate closely with Operations and GTM to guide product direction and help solve the data bottleneck that stands between today's robotics research and real-world deployment. This role requires significant ownership in a fast-paced environment and you will motivate internal teams to set the pace for business growth. Travel will come into play. Key Responsibilities: Set and drive the technical vision across data collection infrastructure, teleoperation systems, ML training pipelines, model evaluation frameworks, annotation tooling, and research Lead a multidisciplinary engineering organization—spanning engineering managers, software engineers, ML engineers, and ML research scientists—while designing the organizational structure, talent strategy, and culture required to scale rapidly without compromising on quality or strategic alignment Maintain exceptional technical and operational excellence by deeply understanding team deliverables, asking incisive questions, identifying slipping standards early, and knowing precisely when to step in Drive cross-functional alignment across Engineering, Operations, and GTM on platform architecture, release processes, and shared priorities Collaborate with researchers and clients to architect and deliver scalable, production-grade data infrastructure tailored for complex robotics workloads Required Qualifications: Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related technical field 8+ years of engineering experience in fast-paced environments, including 4+ years direct people management demonstrated history of recruiting, mentorin

About the Team The DoorDash Research Fellowship is a 3-month program (extendable to 6 months) looking for Summer and Fall 2026 cohorts, for researchers and engineers who want to work on the hardest applied ML and AI problems in local commerce. Fellows are given the resources, autonomy, and access to real-world operational data needed to pursue ambitious research directions — with the goal of producing work that influences both the field and how DoorDash operates at scale. This program is modeled on the best external research fellowships: fellows are treated as independent researchers, not as junior employees on a product team. You pick the problem (within a set of priority areas), you own the direction, and you publish or ship the outcome. You’re excited about this opportunity because you will receive… Dedicated compute allocation sized to the research agenda — GPU clusters for training and inference budgets for experimentation Full access to DoorDash's research infrastructure — our internal RL stack, training and evaluation pipelines, RL environments built on real operational systems, agent evaluation harnesses, and the tooling our own research teams use day-to-day. Fellows are first-class users, not sandboxed visitors. Access to DoorDash operational data — real-world datasets spanning logistics, merchant operations, consumer behavior, and marketplace dynamics, under appropriate data governance Research mentorship from senior researchers and engineering leaders at DoorDash, plus a named research sponsor for each fellow who meets with you weekly and is accountable for unblocking your work Speaker series featuring leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry — faculty from top ML programs, research leads from frontier AI labs, and senior operators from across tech. Fellows get dedicated 1:1 time with speakers when possible. A cohort of fellows working alongside you — a small, tight-knit group of researchers tackling different problems but sharing